The phenomenally successful con movie is set in thirties Chicago, but many of the period locations were found around Los Angeles.

In fact, much of the film was shot at Universal Studios in Hollywood, on the backlot’s all-purpose ‘Main Street’. The carousel run by Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) is the 1916 Looff Carousel, still in action, on the Santa Monica Pier, at the end of Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica. Some tricky artwork turns the pier itself into Chicago’s ‘el’, the elevated railway.

Several real bars served as sets: the plush ‘New York’ gambling casino is a lounge of the Castle Green Apartments, 99 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena. Once a venerable Los Angeles hotel, the Castle Green was drafted into service when the set-building budget began to run low. It was also used for corridors of the ‘Chicago’ hotel.

The bank is the Italian marble lobby of the 1912, seven-storey Commercial and Savings Bank, 225 East Colorado Boulevard at Mareno Avenue in Pasadena.

Nearby is the ‘Chicago’ alleyway. The FBI hideout is the old Koppel Plant, a storage building for grain shipments in the San Pedro harbor district of Los Angeles.

The burlesque theatre is the elaborate set built for the original 1925 Phantom of the Opera at Universal Studios, in Hollywood. Amazingly, it’s still in use.

The railway terminals of Joliet, Chicago and New York are all Chicago, though. Two of the railway terminals were no longer in use and had been converted into office space, which meant that renovations had to be stripped away and old ticket offices restored. The termini are Union Station (still in use); La Salle Street Station (still in use, but the period exterior seen in the movie has since gone); Penn Central Freight Yards and Illinois Central Station.